“Beautiful country burn again…”
–Robinson Jeffers, “Apology for Bad Dreams”
“I’ll do my best never to turn into something that burns, burns, burns.”
–Lana Del Rey, “Wildflower Wildfire”
I began as the beginning, as light–a spark warranting smoke. There was wine drank quick and broken pine needles placed over the height of my mother. When the beasts who created her were through, they smothered her with powdery dirt and dandelion ash. I was left behind, a baby spill of day. When I emerged from the dust, I left the pit on the wind. I had little knowledge then. Now I have more.
The Santa Ana winds brought me to life on a morning in October with a week-old Red Flag warning and a rising burn index. By the time the horizon began to blaze again with the emergence of the still summer sun, I had known I was in California and I had known I was alive. The dry fall heat. The dropping humidity. The bougainvillea rattling in the driveways of every home, coast to climbing mountains. The Santa Anas blew down through the passes and I tore through everything.
They, the people, are killing me now and I want to let them. When I first flickered, a pinprick of what would become a wildfire, I didn’t think of dying. Now, it is all I can think of.
***
I never knew a desert to be so green in a land without rain. My first bit of smoke climbed up into the air directly above Bell Canyon. The brutes that bore me were probably from a rented house high on a hill in Calabasas. It is my understanding that the people of the land I began to rule were entirely aware of my danger. They were consistently in wait of a tempest like me: dry, but violent. Someone from a wetland, like the marshes of Louisiana where my brothers flood the streets, left my mother to die and me an orphan of the brush. A true Calabasian, or hiker of the many canyons, would know how important ensuring my death was. They would see to it I never got the chance to breathe. I would be strangled at every sign of life–battered with calamities of the desert with the trees and the grass and the lakes. Instead, I swallowed large gulps of freshly-made oxygen like it was the nectars of warm lemons and oranges.
I was immediately full of tenacity. I wanted to burn. So, I did. I turned dead twigs black, then gray, then to dust. I thought it was a favor. The bramble was sick, poisonous. It was killing everything else. I was helping. I was making room. I was clearing space for new growth, for life after death. I thought this with confidence until the moment came where I ignited a tarantula’s nest buried within the roots of the ailing branches. A mother, ebony as soot, crawled from the matted webs. I think the heat was too much for her to bear. She had eggs, over two hundred of them. When I came through, and melted away the web she built for them, I destroyed them all. They popped like they’d been overfilled. Some small spiders even came out from the pellet-shaped casings. They were translucent. I could not tell the difference between them and the lit floor. It was her visceral reaction to run, to leave her children behind to die. I don’t know whether or not I hated her for this. My mother hadn’t had the chance to leave me–the winds hadn’t picked up yet. Regardless of my hatred for the dark bug, I burned her too. Her front arms threw up, aggressively, as if she thought she could stop me. I admired her bravery. Now I think it might have been her terror which I was regarding so highly.
I had to move past her. I knew from the beginning how little it mattered to mourn. Had I mourned every life I consumed, I would see no difference. I would continue to grow, rain or shine. The people of Bell Canyon caught word of my broadening at about the same time I pushed straight through a vineyard with small, green grapes. The little fruits melted into me. The sweet sting of boiling wine blew into the air I could not contain. I could never incinerate fruit entirely. I could only melt the legacies from tales long before my time, but a time where fire existed and was feared habitually. I propelled myself through the tilled dirt and wooden stakes that held the grapevines. It was so easy to destroy, every last bit flammable.
Two hundred acres, one structure. No casualties.
I rolled down a hill that fueled me. At its base, a gopher snake was striking at a bleeding fox over a dying cactus mouse. I charred their skin, scales, and fur like there was nothing to it. I interrupted a fight born of fate and necessity. The snake was the first to melt inside my heat. It went for the cactus mouse before attempting to slide through the gravel away from the moving ramparts I created. The fox ran quicker but not quick enough. I overtook him by miles and miles. I stole his breath, burned through the oxygen in the brush that surrounded him.
Seven hundred acres, one structure. No casualties.
I was not literally seven hundred acres big. Once I had taken all the life away from one spot, I had no reason to stay. By this time, I was probably only a mile or two wide. I could be killed in an instant. They just couldn’t reach me in time. Instead, I branded the world. There is no definitive place in which I can place my consciousness, no hearth. It is not at my center, not at the front of which direction I am being blown toward, not where I have just been. I am, in my entirety, witnessing my colors all at once. I choose to focus on one flame at a time: the yellow, the red, the orange. While I burned the gopher snake plagued with greed, I could have been burning a newborn fawn just at the other end of my anarchy. I might have been. I am lucky to be able to pick an eye from which I can gaze. Without it, I would hear nothing but the death by my limbs and the whir of expended oxygen.
***
I heard the firefighters with the heavy yellow jumpsuits as they approached, sirens loud and lights twirling. When they arrived at my edge, they were excusing their delay to one another. It was a complex, they said. Not far away, another brushfire broke out at the top of a hill. It was small enough to spray down with one hose. Did they know I was here while they killed her? I had a sister and they doused her. A bond, instantaneous, strong and full of beauty, fell like a house of cards.
I was overcome with rage the red of my inner flames. I had to leave, to burn. I was almost as small as she had been today, so they sprayed me with flame retardant and my inferno sizzled and smoked. After some time, when I did not grow toward them nor shrink back, they brought in a wildland engine. He was as blood-colored as the very heart of my conflagration. He had the word brush written on the side with an array of numbers I could not decipher in the wavering vision produced from my own heat. He came up an empty freeway, to put me to death. Instead of men jumping from his interior to spray me with a hose, he started shooting me with a nozzle that came from the front of the truck. It was working. I was dying. In an effort to escape, I lit myself a path. Down the knoll, parallel to the freeway, I lit shrub after shrub until I made it far enough away from the villains of my fury.
I could have kept burning in the same treeless plain of snakes and sticks for the rest of my days. My grief chose otherwise. I jumped the freeway that they thought could contain me. I threw embers with all of my might into the branches of willow trees that shuddered in my wake. I was so satisfied with their panic. They had not expected me to have this much doggedness. A fire is not born with contempt. It is created through betrayal. I was just a fire, burning the wasteland. I was creating life. I was helping. I was not going to cross over to the houses they were protecting. The destruction of civilization was not my goal. I was going to decimate in the name of my lovely sister, the one who died on the hill she was born on, trying to climb her way to the sun.
I did not make it up the foothills. There were too many stones. Instead, I burned around the prominence that held the huge houses and high ground. I lit hundreds of trees. The taste of a tree is different from that of a tumbleweed. Tree sap bursts in miniature explosions when exposed to high fever. Bark turns completely into ash. Leaves curl up and branches fall to the floor, soundless. The trunks remain. I left behind a field of candles, the trees lit up at the top. It was almost charming. I found a car at the bottom of the slope. There was no one around. It was left for me. It exploded within my reaches, adding fuel to my frenzy.
Six thousand acres, seventeen structures. No casualties.
I grew in directions I was unaware of. I had not known what I’d burned, or what counted as a structure. Did they include the freeway? The treehouse I kindled? The unmarked grave I ran over? There was so much they did not see. I saw it all, inside and out.
The people who were not actively fighting against me began to evacuate the moment they saw me moving on the horizon. They fled with the shoeboxes they kept near the front door, full of mementos. They threw water at the walls and drove to safer places. They went to the beach, taking the highway all the way down the coast highway and farther, maybe. They left while I stayed and turned the sky so many colors. At first, it was gray from my smoke. My smoke became the sky and, as the sun began to set, the sky became orange. They called it apocalyptic.I call it the sunset.
I burned all through the night. I could do nothing else.
***
Just before dawn. Another blue sky turned orange. I burned through a neighborhood in Agoura Hills. I came up a stretch of very dry grass with the wind on my back. The houses were perfect on a perfect street. They were empty and ideal. The lights were on in every room. The roofs were dripping with water. The garden hoses had been pulled out into the street like long snakes coming together for one last supper.
At the other end of the neighborhood, tall firemen waited with brush trucks and hoses attached to far away hydrants. They waited for me. I made my way to them.
I barreled through the rows of houses as if they weren’t there. My flames had grown far too much to be slowed by a flammable home. One house that I inhabited, imploded. The gas range was on. I ate well.
I guzzled the wet tiles. I tore violently through the thick glass panes and blew the curtains to the ceiling before lighting them. The wallpaper shrunk before falling away in feathery pieces of ash. I burned photos of children and weddings. I burned flowers on the mantel and melted the plastic leather couch. I liquefied a pair of red rain boots. I devoured everything within, all the while moving through.
Then, there was a mother. There was a daughter. They had not yet escaped my path they had anticipated. The two of them were running, on two legs, away from me. The girl was blonde and barefooted. She was in the arms of her running mother, staring at my image. I hadn’t wanted to kill them. I was too quick. She screamed a guttural wail and I singed their beautiful California hair. In a moment, they were lost. This was not how it was supposed to go. They were supposed to be gone. They were meant to save themselves.
The terror which I recognized in the tarantula, the fox, the daughter, was one I found in myself. I was just a fire, not a murderer. The bugs and the beasts were just collateral damage of my greater cause. I approached the firefighters spraying me down, begging them to kill me. I wailed with intensity for them to extinguish me.
Please kill me! Just kill me! Pleasepleasepleaseplease! Kill me, kill me! Kill me as easy as I killed them all!
I was not vanquished so easily. I pushed through the rest of the distance between us. As I got closer, rage settled but force heightened, they began to panic again. They stopped spraying and I have to think that they knew it was over. As the fringe of my extremities reached them, they dropped to the ground and covered themselves in these tarps. They were not body bags, as they became, but blankets that could stop me, in theory. I moved over them and tucked their souls away in the conglomeration of fire, heat, and anguish.
Smokejumpers were falling from the sky in the distance. They were next. In my aftermath, the houses were all gone and all that stood was a wrought-iron spiral staircase in the midst of it all.
Fifty-six thousand acres, 777 structures. Thirty-four casualties.
***
My smoke became larger than I was. I eradicated the marine layer because the sky was dark, dark gray by my design. I will say, the rolling puffs and marbled swirls of smoke really added something to the skyline – where it had previously been buildings, nothing, then palm trees. Even in madness, I was generating beauty that was to be feared. My clouds were simply a sign that I was stealing all of the breathable air.
One front of my attacks had been moving to Malibu all along. They must have been fighting me back pretty well, protecting their treasure. I had an upper hand somewhere down the road, I held one too many aces, and I pushed to the coast. Somewhere between the cliffs of the beach and the wilderness of Topanga, I found a swarm of wasps that wanted only to escape my swelter. The Santa Ana winds were at their climax, harsh and hot-tempered, and the little things with wings could not control their own flight. If my noise quieted, their soft buzz would sound alike to my astringent singing. The winds, I think, blew them right into me.
I had heard, somewhere at the verge of my length, the very many knocks of California’s own: the rattlesnake. They were resting in driveways and under leaves. They love the heat. Deep inside myself, I burned the expensive skin and delicate toys of the creatures. Their venom evaporated in my hot spell. There was so much of it that I think it turned me drunk. That might be why I lit up into a fire whirl, a large tornado of my flames. The Santa Anas and the winds from off the coast pushed me, like convergent boundaries, up and up and up. I saw all of my acres, burned and gone. I wanted to be dead, more than ever, because my destruction was really all mine. This was the moment they feared me most and it was obvious why. I was a monster.
Seventy-one thousand acres, 1245 structures. Thirty-six casualties.
Malibu knew I would come and they couldn’t stop me. They had been prepared for me down in Bel Air and Brentwood, lit a backfire to rid me of my fuel and to protect the glories of L.A. County. I was contained to the higher coast.
I jumped Pacific Coast Highway entirely by accident. I was on the edge of the world. The ocean was beautiful. It sparkled despite the blanket of smog I created. I burned a few of the smaller houses in Malibu, the smaller ones. I left nothing but a standing brick fireplace. There were big wide trenches dug far into the ground that protected the glittering houses. At this border between land and sea, there was nothing left to burn. The coast was a barrier I could not cross. It was almost as if I had seen it all. Until I turned the other way and burned up where no trenches had been dug, and pushed my way north.
I did what I have done. I burned. Hastily and carelessly, until there was a heavily windowed house with a long deck overlooking the rust sea. My wrath approached with ferocity. I hadn’t planned at all on stopping but something did keep my flames back. I burned the house next to it, why could I not burn this one? Maybe it was the poem hanging on the door or the recipe on the fridge or the sandy footprints in the driveway or the rattlesnake on the walk or the bird’s nest on the roof. Whatever the reason, I willed myself to turn the other way. I couldn’t bring myself to destroy another life, even if it was just the house, the home.
***
I had been burning for days in faraway lands. I had been blocked in on one side by the coast. This would begin my downfall. I was being broken off into pieces that were easier to extinguish. My force was diminishing. I was finally under control. They had contained me. I had nothing left to do but wait until they would kill me.
On my last day, I rested as they sprayed the last of me down and down into the charred earth. I rested because I had no more land left to burn. I rested because my purpose had been lost along the stretch of wild freeway. I rested because it is in my nature to go only where I’m allowed. I rested because I was a murderer. I rested because I was mourning. I rested because I was sick with guilt. I rested because the rattlesnakes were emerging. I rested because the falcons my flames sucked down from the sky were circling again, searching for the cactus mouse. I rested because at my height, large peaks of feverish ruin wasted all of my energy. I rested because I was tired and I just wanted to die.
Then, I was put out.
Eighty-nine thousand two hundred seven acres, 1599 structures. Thirty-seven casualties.
Photo by Fachy Marín on Unsplash
